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It may be objected that the Intellectual-Principle possesses
its content in an eternal conjunction so that the two make a
perfect unity, and that thus there is no Matter there.
But that argument would equally cancel the Matter present in the
bodily forms of this realm: body without shape has never existed,
always body achieved and yet always the two constituents. We
discover these two- Matter and Idea- by sheer force of our
reasoning which distinguishes continually in pursuit of the
simplex, the irreducible, working on, until it can go no further,
towards the ultimate in the subject of enquiry. And the ultimate
of every partial-thing is its Matter, which, therefore, must be
all darkness since light is a Reason-Principle. The Mind, too, as
also a Reason-Principle, sees only in each particular object the
Reason-Principle lodging there; anything lying below that it
declares to lie below the light, to be therefore a thing of
darkness, just as the eye, a thing of light, seeks light and
colours which are modes of light, and dismisses all that is below
the colours and hidden by them, as belonging to the order of the
darkness, which is the order of Matter.
The dark element in the Intelligible, however, differs from that
in the sense-world: so therefore does the Matter- as much as the
forming-Idea presiding in each of the two realms. The Divine
Matter, though it is the object of determination has, of its own
nature, a life defined and intellectual; the Matter of this
sphere while it does accept determination is not living or
intellective, but a dead thing decorated: any shape it takes is
an image, exactly as the Base is an image. There on the contrary
the shape is a real-existent as is the Base. Those that ascribe
Real Being to Matter must be admitted to be right as long as they
keep to the Matter of the Intelligible Realm: for the Base there
is Being, or even, taken as an entirety with the higher that
accompanies it, is illuminated Being.
But does this Base, of the Intellectual Realm, possess eternal
existence?
The solution of that question is the same as for the Ideas.
Both are engendered, in the sense that they have had a beginning,
but unengendered in that this beginning is not in Time: they have
a derived being but by an eternal derivation: they are not, like
the Kosmos, always in process but, in the character of the
Supernal, have their Being permanently. For that differentiation
within the Intelligible which produces Matter has always existed
and it is this cleavage which produces the Matter there: it is
the first movement; and movement and differentiation are
convertible terms since the two things arose as one: this motion,
this cleavage, away from the first is indetermination [= Matter],
needing The First to its determination which it achieves by its
Return, remaining, until then, an Alienism, still lacking good;
unlit by the Supernal. It is from the Divine that all light
comes, and, until this be absorbed, no light in any recipient of
light can be authentic; any light from elsewhere is of another
order than the true.
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